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Sunday, January 27, 2013

President Goodluck Jonathan’s Grammatical Boo-boos

For those who don’t know, “boo-boo” is an informal
American English term for “an embarrassing mistake.” Every Nigerian knows that
good grammar isn’t President Goodluck Jonathan’s strong suit. I was probably
the first to publicly call attention to this fact in my April 16, 2010 article
about then Acting President Jonathan’s visit to the US.

In the
article, titled “Dr.
Goodluck Jonathan, that was embarrassing,” I observed, among
other things, that during the Q and A session at the Council on Foreign
Relations, Jonathan “couldn’t articulate a coherent thought, hardly made a
complete sentence, went off on inconsequential and puerile tangents, murdered
basic grammar with reckless abandon, repeated trifles ad nauseam, was
embarrassingly stilted, and generally looked and talked like a timid high
school student struggling to remember his memorized lines in a school debate.”
I concluded that he was “unfathomably clueless” and not “emotionally and
socially prepared for the job of a president—yet.”

This isn’t an attempt to ridicule the president’s
deficiencies in English. Nor is it an analysis of his interview. Since I write
about grammar on this blog every week, I thought it was appropriate that I use
the president’s CNN interview, which millions of Nigerians watched, as a
teaching moment. This is because the usage patterns of the elite of
any country--especially of the president, who is the most important political
and cultural figure in a country--tend to get naturalized and imitated by the
general population over time. (Next week I will write about how the prominent
political and cultural elite of (Anglophone) societies influence the rules of
English usage).

I have listed below some of the rankest grammatical
bloopers that the president committed during the CNN interview. I have left out
clumsy, semantically puzzling constructions that, in my judgment, were the
consequence of the familiar, excusable pressures of impromptu dialogic exchange.

1.
“Thank you.” Christiane Amanpour started the
interview by saying “Goodluck Jonathan, thank you very much for joining me from
Davos.” The president’s response to this courteous expression of gratitude was
“thank you.” Again, at the end of the
interview when Amanpour said, “President Goodluck Jonathan, thank you for
joining me,” the president responded by saying “thank you.”

That is not
the conventional response to an expression of gratitude in the English language.
When someone says “thank you” to you, conversational courtesy in English requires
you to respond with such fixed phrases as “you’re welcome,”“(it’s) my pleasure,” etc. Other less
familiar responses are “think nothing of it” and “don’t mention it” (which is
chiefly British, although it’s now going out of circulation in contemporary
British English.) In very casual contexts, it’s usual for people to say “(it’s)
not a problem,” “sure,” “you bet,” “not at all,” “any time,” etc.

It is neither conventional nor idiomatic to say
“thank you” to a “thank you.”

2.
“Committed to work with….” In response to a question about
the insurgency in Mali, President Jonathan said, “And that is why the Nigerian
government is totally committed to work with other nationals, other friendly
governments to make sure that we contain the problems in Mali.” In grammar, the
verb that comes after “committed to” is always in the progressive tense, that
is, it always takes an “ing” form. So the president should properly say “we are
totally committed to working with…”

3.
Subject-verb agreement.This rule states that a singular subject agrees
with a singular verb (that is, a verb with an “s” at the end) and a plural
subject agrees with a plural verb (that is, a verb without an “s” at the end.) It
is obvious that the president has a continuing challenge with subject-verb
agreement. This comes out clearly in all his media interviews and extempore
speeches. For instance, in response to a journalist’s question about the Libyan
crisis during a “State of the Nation” media chat in 2011, the president famously
said, “Libyan
crisis is like a pot of water dropped and everything scatter.”

Of course, it should properly be “everything
scatters” since “everything” is a singular subject that always agrees with a
singular verb. Perhaps, the president was interlarding his speech with Nigerian
Pidgin English (where the phrase “everything scatter scatter,” popularized by Nigerian pop singer
Eedris Abdulkareem, is standard and means “everything is
upside down.”)

But during
the Amanpour interview, in response to another question on Libya, the president
again said, “the issue of Libya try to create more problems in the sub region.”
Well, it should be “the issue of Libya tries to create…” because “the issue,”
which modifies the verb in the sentence, is a singular subject. The president
clearly has not the vaguest idea what subject-verb agreement means.

4.
“Ghaddafi was thrown.” Who threw Ghaddafi? From where was
he thrown? The president probably meant to say “Ghaddafi was overthrown.”

5.
“Weapons enter into hands of non-state actors.”
This is undoubtedly Nigerian Pidgin English where “enter” functions as a
catch-all verb for a whole host of things, such as “enter a bike” (for “ride a
bike”), “enter ya shoes” (for “wear your shoes”), etc. The president meant to
say “weapons got into the hands of non-state actors.”

6.
“And I have said it severally…” Here, the president
fell into a popular Nigerian English error: the misuse of “severally” to mean
“several times.”This is what I wrote in
a previous article titled “Adverbial
and Adjectival Abuse in Nigerian English”:“Perhaps the trickiest of the adverbs we
misuse is the word ‘severally.’ We often use the word as if it meant ‘several
times.’ It is typical for Nigerians to say ‘I have told you severally that I
don’t like that!’ or ‘I have been severally arrested by the police.’ In
Standard English, however, ‘severally’ does not mean ‘several times’; it only
means individually, singly, independently, without others, etc., as in ‘the
clothes were hung severally.’ This means the clothes are apart from each other
and don’t touch each other. Strikingly odd, not so?”

7.
“They should try and filter the truth.” This is the full
context of this odd sentence: Amanpour told President Jonathan that the US
State Department has said that police brutality has killed more Nigerians than
Boko Haram has. This outraged the president who said the following in response:
“The State Department from the United States they have, they have the means of
knowing the truth. They should try and filter the truth.”

Now, to filter (out) is to “remove or separate
(suspended particles, wavelengths of radiation, etc.) from (a liquid, gas,
radiation, etc.) by the action of a filter.” Example:“Filter out the impurities.” By metaphorical
extension, if someone “filters the truth,” as President Jonathan is urging the
US State Department to do, they are actually removing the truth which, in
essence, means they are lying. In other words, Jonathan is asking the US
government to ignore the truth and embrace falsehood. Of course, that is not
what he meant. But that is what he comes across as saying.

8.
“…before the bulb can light.” This is a semantically
and structurally awkward construction. It’s probably the translation of the
president’s native language, which is fine. But it is confusing for people who
don’t speak his language. You can light a bulb with something, such as a
battery, but can a bulb “light”? The bulb has no agency. Perhaps, the president
meant to say “before the bulb can light up.” Light up is a fixed verb phrase.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

Dr. Kperogi earned his B.A. in Mass Communication ( minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

He worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States

Dr. Kperogi was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta. He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based Weekly Trust and "Politics of Grammar" in Sunday Trust.

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication.